Lead Qualification Process

The most important tool you can give to your SDR team is an effective rating and lead-qualification process. The more relevant information that you have about your prospect, the better equipped that your sales team will be.

Whether you use automation lead scoring, warm-hot-cold or an old-school notebook, it is paramount that you have a consistent rating system to document the level of interest of your prospective clients.

Lead Qualification

At EBQ, we have optimized our lead qualification process by creating our own customized system, which we call the EBrating.

The EBrating is a way to eliminate unknowns in order to prioritize outreach.

We found that the archaic version of cold versus hot did not provide sufficient information for our Sales and Marketing teams, so we spent years developing what we like to think is the best lead qualifying system.

The EBrating system is the next iteration of cold vs. hot and takes lead qualification to the next level by providing greater visibility and relevancy. The EBrating is more granular and allows for effective segmentation and proper debriefing for your sales team.

Ways to Effectively Use the EBrating System

The EBrating is an effective way to organize your database. As you might notice from the chart, a new prospect starts at a 7, and the closer your prospect gets to 0, the closer that you are to setting an appointment.

This allows your SDR team to place individual prospects into “interest buckets” and use that as a way to segment the database.

Benefits of Lead Qualification

One of the benefits of lead qualification is that it plays well with marketing automation campaigns. If you are using Pardot or a similar automation tool with your Salesforce instance, you can create campaigns that focus on certain bucket of prospects within the EBrating system.

For example, let’s say that your SDR team reached out to a computer software client and was asked to follow up next quarter (EBrating=5). Your Marketing Team could then create email drips with thought-leadership content to send out periodically and keep your brand name at top of mind.

Project Future Growth

In addition to being an effective organization tool, the EBrating or similar qualification tools can be used to project sales growth. If you purchase a list, you won’t see immediate growth in your sales appointments or closed deals in the short-term, but, you will be able to project growth in the long-run by identifying interested prospects.

Get Funded: EBQ has been privileged to have had over 25 partner companies go through liquidity events and achieve a successful funding. The companies were able to achieve a higher valuation multiplier from the venture capitalist as a result of a well organized top funnel from the EBrating system. Learn More

For example, let’s say that a client has a database of 10,000 cold prospects and they hire EBQ to qualify the prospect database. EBQ then identified 300 interested leads after their calling efforts, all with an ASP of 50,000 and an average closing rate of 20%. As a result, the company would be able to make a case for $3,000,000 additional revenue in the pipeline to the venture capitalist.

This is a great example of how you can use an appointment setting effort along with a strong lead qualification process to project future growth.

Relevant Note Taking

It’s important to remember that your appointment setters are not just dialing through a list with the hope of getting lucky, but rather they are extracting tidbits of information with each touchpoint. This mentality of validated learning will allow them to adjust their outreach frequency and messaging as they learn more about their prospects.

If you are using Salesforce.com, your SDR team can create custom fields and comments about the level of interest of each prospect. This way your Sales team can have greater visibility to information that would be valuable for the sales call.